2011-04-24, 19:00
poofyhairguy Wrote:My favorite option, and the only one I use, is Unraid (note I have nothing to do with those who run Unraid other than I like the software). You have to pay money for this software, but I think its very much worth it because its the only NAS software on the market which is pretty much designed for mediaservers.Poofy, I'm currently rounding up the hardware to start on a media server. While unraid was in the running, I'm strongly leaning towards flexraid because I can install it on top of Win7 and have SAB, SickBeard, uTorrent and CouchPotato all on a single box along with flexraid.
Advantages of Unraid
-Allows you to mix and match drives of different sizes and makes into a single "User Share" of pooled storage (one big folder across drives)
-Allows you to pull the drives of the array out and read the data on them on another computer
-Allows drives to spin down if they are not being accessed, saving power and possible prolonging their life
-Unraid allows for the growing of the array in size by replacing one drive at a time with full use of that drive after addition and no data loss
-Unraid is easy to install, runs off a pen drive to save sata ports for data, and is configured by and easy to use web interface
Downsides:
-Unraid costs money for real versions
-Unraid's write speeds are pretty low without a cache drive
-Unraid's read speeds are slightly lower than the drives by themselves, but still more than fast enough for media
-Unraid is a dedicated NAS OS, meaning that it can't easily do other server stuff for you
I know you use SAB, SB and CP - can you perhaps describe your full setup? Do you have the content acquisition on another box (aside from the HTPCs and the "server")? Do you download directly to the unraid array, or use an intermediary location?
Thanks